After all the average speed threads I thought I’d do a test to answer the most important and exciting BF question of all time “what’s your average cruising speed?”
Firstly, I need to set the scene and define a few things:
- Cruising power was defined in a previous thread as an IF of 0.8. Therefore I aimed for an effort that would produce IF = 0.8.
- That’s fine for those with power meters but what does it mean? I decided (I’m doing the test I can decide what I like) that you should be able to maintain cruising speed for a BF average ride time of a few hours – so I rode for a few hours – repeatable without a PM.
- I recoded HR as most people can do this - it shows it was a maintainable effort for a “cruising” time period. Again, repeatable without a PM. Obviously your numbers will be different and obviously I don’t give a s$!t what your numbers are. The HR trace is simply proof that this was a maintainable and comfortable effort for those without a PM. Yes there is some interference from overhead power lines near the start – I don’t care, I was in town.
- Cruising (by definition) does not include the warm up / cool down therefore I recorded these as separate files and excluded them.
- Cruising speed is relative to terrain, so I rode a basically flat course. It is also relative to conditions so I did it on a calm ish night and I did an out and back route to even out wind effects. The Garmin elevation is way off but I assure you it was flat – along the sea front, town is 50m higher than the sea front.
- My route had an average number of stop lights/junctions. It started by going through town and ended back near town.
- I consider myself an averagely strong rider. My power profile shows my FTP as mid Cat 3 and upper Cat 3 for 5 min. It’s enough gogo to enjoy riding – it won’t win me much/anything.
- I did it on my average Synapse carbon 5 105 set up to position me averagely aero. It has bog standard everything except a non aero powertap training wheel. I could have used my Colnago but that would have caused you BF muppets to get all excited about me doing it on a “faster bike” so I saved myself the effort of having to read your effin silly ideas about bike speed.
- I did it after an average day at work on an average week night and finished averagely tired.
- I can’t think of any way to make this more average! I put the emphasis on cruising, maintaining a constant RPM and power with no hard efforts, rests or anything other than just cruising. Speed wandered according to conditions. Any peaks in the graph are due to stop lights/junctions. I was in the drops for the bulk of the test.
So I now have a definitive answer – I know what the cruising speed of an averagely trained, average cyclist on an average bike riding in average conditions on an averagely flat course actually is
I’m just debating whether to post up the graph of this utterly stupid and pointless test or just leave you all to flame my method of testing for a few pages before deciding to save myself the effort.